ZDNet India group: Outsourcing saves U.S. jobs

"Citing statistics from market research firms such as McKinsey, the body said the United States stands to save over $300 billion over the next six years by shifting some business operations overseas."

""US banks, financial services and insurance companies have saved $6 billion to $8 billion in the past four years owing to IT outsourcing to India," Nasscom claimed. "Helped by these savings, companies have prevented layoffs and instead added 125,000 more jobs.""

redux [07.12.03]
Wired News IT Sweatshops Breaking Indians

"Laxmikant Purohit, a 34-year-old services manager at SoftTel Information Services who works from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., says he suffers from constipation and acid stomach. In the past eight months he has put on 29 pounds, he said.

"It's difficult to have a positive outlook toward life because everything seems dark and gloomy when you work at ungodly hours," he said. "It's the first month that is the most terrible. One or two weeks after joining, new recruits throw up in the middle of work.""

redux [07.08.03]
Salon How outsourcing will save the world

"There is no better form of trade a developing nation can engage in than to sell services provided by an educated population. Compare it to anything else a developing nation can sell -- natural resources like oil or minerals or agribusiness, hard labor in manufacturing, for instance -- and you'd probably find that white-collar jobs would be the most sustainable and most eco-friendly of any of them.

Those concerned about solving the world's problems should be falling over themselves to encourage developing nations to build a white-collar workforce, and to open that workforce to the world."

redux [07.03.03]
Salon White-collar sweatshops

"Napier says that neither the bursting of the late-'90s tech bubble nor the doldrums of a poky recovery from the recession explain his layoff and ongoing unemployment. He places the blame for his woes on globalization: the double whammy of American companies flooding an already soft job market with foreign workers brought into the United States on H1-B visas while at the same time employing non-U.S. workers still in their home countries to write code or perform other high-tech services.

The latter practice, known as "outsourcing" or "offshoring" or even "near shoring" when it takes place in a neighboring country, is based on a simple economic rationale: Cut costs by sending work overseas to someone who will do it for less money."

redux [06.12.03]
AlwaysOn Software Development Goes Abroad - For Good

"How efficient is it to pay a software engineer in the Valley a loaded salary of $170,000, the average salary reported in the fourth quarter of 2001, when Asian engineers provide a much better value? We've all read the cost differentials between US and Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese workers. And one of the main reasons this work went overseas is because clients knew they were being gouged by US engineers and consultants. After all, programming is, essentially, production work. And is labor not the most expensive variable component of a software product?

It's easy to recognize that we're witnessing the demise of an industry that had a nice run in the Valley."

BBC India warns US over outsourcing

"India has warned the US and other developed countries that if they limit the extent to which information technology is outsourced it will damage their domestic industry.

"India's Information Technology Secretary Rajiv Ratan Shah said outsourcing was a huge international movement and that it was unstoppable."

Wired News Jobs Squeeze for Indian Workers

"U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft are already exploring countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, says a report from research firm IDC. The new destinations include Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

As a result, India, which some have blamed for the loss of American jobs, may soon lose jobs itself."

redux [12.19.02]
Talahassee Democrat Survey predicts tech salary slip

"Tech workers may want to cut another notch in their belts because they'll most likely have to tighten them next year."

""I think that what you're seeing there is the old supply and demand," said John Reed, metro market manager in Dallas for parent company Robert Half International Inc. "Obviously, with more candidates available in the marketplace, companies have got a little more negotiating power.""

redux [11.27.02]
BBC News Hi-tech workplace no better than factories

"Staff in technology jobs work in the white collar equivalent of a 19th century factory. suffering from isolation, job insecurity and long hours, research has found."

"He looked at the characteristics of hi-tech workplaces, which are seen as a potential model for the future of work."

SiliconValley.Com Job migration is draining Silicon Valley

"The export of IT jobs from America to English-speaking Third World countries is a worrying new trend. First predicted more than a decade ago in Ed Yourdon's book ``The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,'', Yourdon went on to suggest that American programmers could avoid unemployment by becoming more productive with the help of software tools. His identification of the trend was correct, but his solution was wrong."

"The export of IT jobs has a permanent vicious cycle effect. As the jobs migrate, there are more and more unemployed people chasing fewer opportunities here."